This is the view from my office. Because this window faces north, changes in weather often come this way, and today was no exception. A front was slowly moving through bringing with it some drizzle if not showers and a pinch of wet snow for good measure.
I go through some days feeling creatively barren, as if covered with a fog. My brain cannot keep focus of what’s important, nor can it generate a spark of an idea. I’d welcome a nugget of thought that morphs into a theme, a sentence, a paragraph and even a photograph.
When that kind of fog moves in, I used to double down on my brain as if I could purposefully, indeed consciously command by merely thinking, “I need something to work with here! Get it off the ground.” A couple mugs of green tea or coffee later, nothing appears on my creative radar.
And so I apply a way of thinking and visualizing to help reveal something/anything beneath that fog. I imagine what’s lying beneath not only my creative fog, but the cloak draped outside my window. Somehow the symbiosis of such processing helps clear my brain fog. It doesn’t reveal something monumental; it’s not a Eureka! moment at all. Some real right-brain elbow juice comes into play. I’m from the school that believes there’s no such thing as a “dumb idea or answer.” Possibilities abound depending on your attitude.
The transition time varies, sometimes in an hour, other times a day or 2 later. I suppose other efforts have probably taken longer to render that creative crumb-of-an idea or concept. If I knew how to sketch, perhaps it would be easier and at times faster to arrive at the idea. However, it’s just the way this person works. Not very exciting. The excitement–if you can call it that–is more a feeling of relief and satisfaction.
Whether I’m looking at a blank sheet of paper, a clean page in my journal or through a camera viewfinder [yes, very old school this guy], I sometimes think of Occam’s razor, a philosophy that states when troubled with competing solutions or ideas for a desired outcome, often the simplest version is the very solution that makes sense.
Carlo Centeno 